Another 100,000+ week for Fedora 10

Fedora 10 has been gaining new users at impressive rates. This past week alone Fedora 10 has picked up over 100,000 more. This puts the total number of Fedora users somewhere around 12-13 million, higher than any other Linux distribution. (If you disagree, please direct me to numbers.) At last count, Fedora 10 has a 15% gain in users over Fedora 9. This measurement was taken before this impressive week so the total gain might even be more than that.

Why is this? I can think of at least 3 reasons:

1. An unparallelled commitment to innovation: While some communities have adopted ‘feature stagnation’ as their method of innovation, Fedora has been relentless in bringing new features to the Linux forefront. I have already blogged about how Fedora 11 may possibly be the most innovative Linux release ever. And, like always, these features are the kind that other distros get very excited about adopting. This is the ultimate acknowledgment that your feature set is full of great ideas.

2. Increased quality of release: Paul Frields recently articulated how release quality has become a major goal of the Fedora project. Fedora has shown it is possible to be a very innovative Linux distribution while at the same time giving users a solid experience. To quote the media: “The best thing of all [these features] is that they all work smoothly and seamlessly together. Fedora 10 is what a cutting edge Linux distribution should be. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can download this free community Linux distribution today from the Fedora download site. ”

3. Fantastic community: Fedora’s commitment to community can be seen at all levels. In time where many companies are distributing layoffs Red Hat continues to hire established community leaders, projects like fedora-community and the Mokhsa are in full force, and new ambassadors are joining the project literally every day. (Statistically) The Fedora Project not only produces great software, but has built a community people are excited to be a part of. That makes a difference.

I am one of the countless former Red Hat users that went after other, more user friendly, distros. I have used of and on Mandrake, SuSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, and Arch. Right now, my laptop triple boots between Fedora 10 (KDE), Mandriva 2009 (KDE), and PCLinuxOS. I have to say that I am very pleased with Fedora 10. The last updates I made brought me to KDE 4.2.0 and I would not be surprised to see 4.2.1 soon. But, it is not just the freshness of the packages that I am impressed with. I am very impressed with the polish that I am finding on the distro as a whole. Of course, this probably varies from hardware to hardware, but on this machine, everything is working very, very well.

That having been said, I am still not ready to make Fedora my only distro. From past experience (Fedora 9), I would not be in the least surprised if Fedora 11 turns out to be so full of bugs that it becomes more of a burden than a tool. I find Mandriva to be more consistently stable between releases than Fedora. KDE 4 is getting so good that I may even give Kubuntu another try. (They couldn’t possibly botch it that bad now.😉 And, PCLinuxOS may be making a comeback soon. Texstar has been seen around the forums lately which may mean that he may be getting close to retaking the development of the distro.

On the other hand, if Fedora seems to be making steady improvements in its quality and stability. If Fedora 11 delivers another winner, I can see many more users and developers flocking to it. Congratulations on their success so far!

Number of downloads can be deceptive. I use three computers – home, office, and laptop, all with Fedora 10. Since I loaded them at different times, I downloaded the iso three complete times. I don’t recall if there were any incomplete downloads.
But whether there were or were not any incompletes, am I three users or one user?

In the last two weeks, I have first installed Fedora 10 on two of my PCs. Plus two users! I then decided this week though to move both PCs to Debian Lenny. I guess these two lost users have not been counted.

Do you know how to estimate the number of horses in a country when this number was secret? (when horses were used in war) You look at the production of horsehoes. If you know both numbers in another country and you know that it eight horsehoes per horse and per year then you can come with an estimation in the other country. Also it can be that you are interested in evolution: a sharp increase in horseshoe production is likely to mean a sharp increase in number of horses. Same thing with Fedora. We all know that number of downloads and number of uses are not the same thing but being major technological innovations (eg when people got ADSLs) the ration downloads/uses should be roughly stable in a two or three years span. So if number of downloads is increasing it shoulkd mean something.

I agree that there probably is some means of estimating actual users from the number of downloads but I’m not buying your analogy. Materials for horseshoes cost money and effort must be expended to make the shoes. A blacksmith is not likely to create a huge inventory of shoes just for the heck of it or so he can throw them away after playing with them for a month or so.

Linux downloads, on the other hand, require little effort and are free. I take a look at other Gnome based distro’s every couple of years via a download and install. I usually blow them away after a few days and go back to Fedora. So, even though I am a fairly recent downloader of Ubuntu, PCLinux, Mint, and SUSE, I use none of them.

Numbers of machines logging in for updates is a better metric, but again, we return to: am I one user or three since I have three pc’s running FC10?

Just to clear up the record, in course there is confusion: These statistics are not based on downloads, but based on # of new computer’s receiving updates. If you go to the link you will find this disclaimer:

“The numbers above for yum represent unique IP addresses that reach our update server, not simply downloads. We believe it is reasonable to equate a “new IP address checking in” with “a new installation of Fedora”, with the following caveats:

1. Users who have dynamic IP addresses will likely be counted multiple times, which inflates the number by some amount.
2. Users who are behind NAT or corporate proxies will not be counted at all.

The anecdotal evidence that we receive from different groups, companies, and organizations suggests that group (2) is significantly larger than group (1). As such, we believe that the true numbers in the field are higher than the numbers on this page.”

Your considerations apply to individual users. But here we were dealing with large numbers and when you have large samples and take the average then the variance of the averge tends towrds zero. Now you have to explain me why on Fedora 9 on average 1 downloada meant say 0.5 permanent installations and on Fedira 10 it would only mean say 0.25. So I repeat myself, what is interesting is not absolute numbers but trends. If we admit, and there are no reasons to believe the opposite, that the “permanent installation rate” has remained roughly stable between Fedora 9 and 10 then it means that Fedora 10 is seeing more usage than Fedora 9.

If you disagree about hypothesis of stability of “permanent’s usage rate” then tell why. I, for one, see no reason, this ratio should have gone down since I am not aware of any significant change be it technological, commercial (availability in magazines) or sociological (profile of Linux users) who could have affected it in the timespan between both releases.

From 2006 to 2008, Canonical’s best estimates show absolutely no Ubuntu userbase growth. No growth. And let me remind you that 2006 quote was pre-Dell deal.
And since noone outside of Canonical has access to the data being used to generate those numbers, I guess we just all have to talk their word on that estimated lack of growth.
I’m cool with that if you are. May I suggest you change your tagline in all press materials to this:
Ubuntu: zero estimated userbase growth since Dec 2006 and lovin’ it!

Ubuntu is all about open community processes right? Then this is should be an easy challenge to meet. Stroll into the community counsel meeting and make a polite request asking for the methodology used to determine that the Ubuntu userbase has been stagnate since 2006 with absolutely no overall growth.

If Canonical and Shuttleworth aren’t comfortable with making any concrete statement about positive Ubuntu userbase growth since December 2006, why should anyone in the external community outside Canonical feel comfortable making that claim?

Just to give an example of Joseph’s enterprise vs. dynamic IP user statistics, I run a local yum mirror at work for about 30 servers plus more VMs. I suspect deployments 1000x this are not uncommon. Many Bluegene setups, some of the world’s fastest super computers, use it. That’s a big accolade, not only the number of nodes, but the substance of such a system.

For your local yum mirror at work are you using MirrorManager’s advanced features concerning local network block configuations so that the Fedora clients on your network automatically get handed your local yum mirror address without per client reconfiguration of yum?

If you aren’t aware of that feature you should check it out and see if it would make sense to establish a private mirror listing in Fedora’s MirrorManager. That way your clients on your local network block still show up in our stats by contacting MirrorManager for a mirrorlist..but they end up using your local mirror.